Bush is wrong, again!!

[Jeremy]

Originally Posted by JR

if you stopped and thought for 2 seconds about your arguement you would realize that the inverse would also be true in that others would not torture for fear of their own being tortured.

Yeah! Get your retaliation in first! That's the way to do it.

[JR]

Originally Posted by Jeremy

Yeah! Get your retaliation in first! That's the way to do it.

not what i was saying at all. if you use the argument that torture will result in retaliation, then you have to assume that the other side see's value in using torture as a means of cohersion. if thats true then the whole argument falls apart.

i personally dont believe that Iran would capture 100 soldiers or pilots after an attack on their nuclear facilities and not do everything possible to extract every bit of info they could for them and seriously doubt that the health and wellbeing of those captives would be their first concern.

intelligence relies very heavily on torture to extract info quickly when the situation requires. do you think 10 guys who tried to blow up an embassy and killed 300 people are just going to sit down and give up the details of their organization without any form of cohersion? what if more attacks are imminent? are you supposed to ask people who hate you more than anything in this world and want to kill as many of your people as possible nicely to give you some help?

torture is not something thats done for sadistic fun. its a method from extracting info. the more pressure they can put on someone, the more info they get and the more accurate it tends to be.

i dont think people should be getting their dicks cut off an served to them on a bed of rice for breakfast just to see if they know something... but i think that smacking people around, playing mind games, breaking them down by depriving them of food, sleep, isolation etc is fine.

you can't apply all the rules of compassion and humanity to people who are 100% pure evil.

[JR]

there was a show on the history channel just yesterday about the 84 embassy bombing in beirut. lebonese authorities nabbed most of them within an hour (because they already knew who they were and what they were going to do).

they were interrogated by the CIA, trying to be nice etc. finally the interrogators went to their superiors and said "either we get rough with these guys or we should just go home because we are wasting our time". what happened? some new guys came in, beat the shit out of them. they starting finding more people. arrested one guy who was well connected and thought was untouchable and who actually organized the whole thing, they beat the shit out of him and broke him down until he started talking.

then they got to the bottom of everything pretty quickly. what if he was innocent? well, that would suck. the problem in all of this is that its not so black and white. bad people, who already do not fear death and are doing terrible shit and motivated by hatred dont talk very easily either.

my point is simply that there has to be some balance. you can't just categorically say "ok, we are not even going to go as far as sleep deprivation because we are very high and mighty and shining beacons of morality" -- when you have no other ways to get info and reliable info and particularly time sensitive info from them.

what you do is exactly what is being done now. you publically say you are the shining beacon of morality and in private you send teams of people in to kidnap and torture people or fly them to somewhere and let those security services do it. thats why i said the new bill is just a silly political game and theater for the public. somewhere in saudi arabia, there is a guy named habib right now getting his ass beaten within an inch of his life because he has info on the insurgency in iraq, terrorist plots or whatever. so be it. i am very ok with that. suggesting that some poor kid walking down 1st avenue in seattle is going to get mistakenly nabbed by men in black and tortured (which under the law, really means some pretty mild shit anyway) is no more troublesome to me than suggesting someone might die in a car wreck. shit happens.